No particular concept (e.g. 'God') is necessarily incompatible with science.
But certain systems of uncovering truth are. For example, if you decide what to believe is true
based on what is written in a particular book, and trust this above any other evidence, you will likely put
yourself at odds with science sooner or later.
Dogmatic belief is contrary to science. Religion is not the only place where dogmatic beliefs come from,
nor does it necessarily require dogmatic belief, but they often go together.
I think purplewolfhound has a point though. I was kind of surprised you used that quote in the way you did; it's not really appropriate. The quote is about being helped through a time of grief by a friend, which is not specifically a "60s ideal" as far as I can tell.
While I'm responding, I'd also like to say that the sharing of music is not something that first appeared in the 1960's. Music has been shared within communities since its origin. The ownership of music is a much newer concept than the sharing of music.
The dot lets you know you're talking about a website. If you see a commercial and it says "go to getfirefox.com" you know you are supposed to type that into your web browser. If people hear instead "go to getfirefox" that will require further explanation...
The Stroop effect cannot be supposed to have its own neural substrate, it's just an effect of interaction between subtrates that have different functions.
I don't understand what you are saying here. The point is that ACC activity is greater in conflict (color and world incompatible) compared with non-conflict (color and word same color) conditions.
Less activity can be easily explained as paying attention to one instead of two sources of information.
Except that reading the word is generally beleved to be "pre-attentive", that is, whether you pay attention to it or not the word is read. In the Stroop task people are generally trying to pay attention to the ink color, but despite this, the content of the word interferes.
Who the hell allowed this to be published?
The National Academy of Sciences. I guess they should add you as a reviewer?:)
A voxel, by definition, is the smallest spatial resolution unit.
Right, but your original comment said that fMRI "averages across areas". I still disagree with that, although it seems now to be just an issue of phrasing. Having poor spatial resolution is not the same as intentionally averaging across space. We do motion correction, yes, aligning each
volume to one reference, and there is error in that process. Usually there is spatial smoothing as well to increase signal to noise ratio at each voxel. Re-reading your comments it seems that is likely what you are referring to. There is also inter-subject alignment which is sloppy too. There are trade-offs between many factors, spatial and temporal resolution, etc. that must be made for each circumstance. I certainly agree it would be nice to have even better spatial resolution fMRI (although you can get even sub-mm resolution if you restrict your field of view). I just thought your initial comment was misleading and made it seem that fMRI signal processing intentionally disregarded anatomical boundaries, when in fact often the whole goal of the process is to preserve spatial qualities if the signal.
We are also doing a lot of work to characterize the kind of variability you refer to, both anatomically and functionally. However, given the amount of individual variation, when we do find a consistent cross-subject effect it makes it all the more impressive.
The main 'evidence' in this article is from a 'brain scanner' which is probably fMRI. As one of my professor's liked to say, "In fMRI we show people a picture of their ass, then a picture of a hole in the ground, and subract them." Most fMRI statistics include averaging across areas... which is nice, until you remember that our brain isn't on a sphere, but something with fissures in it, and so you just averaged two things that were (cortically speaking) in other worlds (since because of the fissure they might be centimeters apart! Remember the Cortex is a laminar archiecture around the surface)... so I'm highly skeptical, to say the least.
I gotta disagree with this part. First, most fMRI stastics are voxel-based. That is, independent statistics are done on each spatial location at the finest resolution you acquire. Then, you make some corrections for the fact that you are doing so many independent analyses. It's quite rare to "average across areas" and I'm not sure why anyone would do such a thing.
In fact, there are many analysis techniques that treat the cortex as a 2D surface, unfolding it before any other processing. fMRI has many weaknesses, but I don't think this particular criticism is valid. Also, your professors criticism about the subtraction is misleading as fMRI statistics rarely do real subtractions any more, they are really a form of multiple regression (the paper referenced in the article used SPM as their statistics package.)
As for the top-down thing, clearly attention influences perception. In one of the studies mentioned in TFA, the Stroop effect was shown to be diminshed by hypnosis. That's pretty impressive. (In the stroop test, you see a word and must read its color. People are slower when the ink color conflicts with the written word, since reading the word is so fast and automatic.) The subjects in this study were hypnotized to believe the language was just gibberish. I don't know what other kind of evidence of top-down processing you would want!
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
Not sure what you're referring to here - there is an interhemispheric version of the Stroop task, but that's not what's being used here. And evidence for a difference in corpus callosum size between left and right handers is sketchy at best.
Anyways, the Stroop is one of the oldest and best-studied paradigms in experimental psychology, and pretty much everyone shows a robust effect; the processing of the language is so automatic and fast that it interferes with your reading off of the ink color.
Raz has shown a diminished Stroop effect in subjects who were hypnotized to believe the language was just gibberish. That's a pretty impressive effect, because reading is considered quite automatic. Even cooler, the hypnotized showed less anterior cingulate activity than non-hypnotized subjects. The anterior cingulate is active in the Stroop task and others like it, and seems to respond to situations of "conflict" where there are two potential motor resposnses competing for control. It's very nice work.
This is a good point, and I would add that it's important to keep in mind how much language and culture are intertwined. Translating effectively isn't really an exercise in finding the corresponding words in the two languages. Its about finding the most appropriate way to convey the same message in the two languages. I don't really know anything about Iraqi culture, but it is certainly possible that it's not appropriate or effective for a commanding officer to give instructions in a polite, watered down manner.
Beyond that, this is an interesting case, because we are also trusting the translation subtitles on the Discovery channel. The fact of the matter is that translation is a complex, difficult problem that does not necessarily have one best solution.
First, although TFA says that 12 percent of passengers show stress even when they have nothing to hide, it does not say that these 12% fail the test. In fact, it says:
"In our trial, 500 passengers went through the test, and then each was subjected to full traditional searches," said chief executive officer Amir Liberman. "The one person found to be planning something illegal was the one who failed our test."
So that's pretty good. But even if there are a lot of false positives, it serves as an initial screen to tell you where to focus further attention. Keep in mind this is being developed in Israel, where airport security is already quite time-consuming and invasive, because it needs to be. If you can spend more time on the 10% of the passengers who are more likely to be hiding something, that does help.
Occam's Razor suggests that the original tests were wrong
The simplest solution is not always the correct one. In this case, since the potential benefits are so great,
it seems worth looking into the possibility that he beat the disease.
Sort of. TMS is very crude; even with a figure-8 coil that focus the magnetic field you are still stimulating an area of cortex with diameter of a couple centimeters. And you can't really "feed in information" you can just zap the thing (stimulating it or knocking it out depending on how you time the pulses). So TMS is not the answer here...
OK I just read the Science article. What's interesting about it is that they got recordings from a large population of neurons in IT during object recognition and have some cool analyses of the kinds of information that can be extracted from the capture, e.g. how large a population of neurons you need to accurately identify the object, how well the neurons discriminated among the categories and generalized across the same image at different sizes and positions, etc.
Important to remember that these monkeys were trained on a limited stimulus set, so its not that you can tell what the monkey is looking at by loooking at the recordings without knowing it is one of these pre-trained items.
Seems to me they are just recording from IT neurons. There's no input to the cortex. I haven't read the science paper (is it out yet?) but it really seems like they are just analyzing the firing patterns of IT neurons while the monkey looks at objects. Nothing new here technology-wise.
No, they didn't pick that date, the court did. This friday was the "interim deadline" for "Parties to Disclose with Specificity All Allegedly Misused Material Identified to Date and to Update Interrogatory Responses Accordingly". December 22 is set as the final deadline.
Why was level 60 the goal? Was the fun of the game not merit enough?
I think part of what makes games like this interesting is how they capitalize on our goal/reward system. They try to find the spot where you have a tangible goal, which is just difficult to be totally engaging - not too difficult to be frustrating, and not too easy to be boring. This is what humans apparently want to do, we find it immensely rewarding. (See Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow for some good theory and research about this).
I recently started playing w.o.w., but one of the things that impresses me about it is that they way it acheives the appropriate level of challenge is by leaving many levels of challenge open for the player to find the right one. Rather than trying to predict exactly how difficult each task needs to be, the player naturally finds the tasks that are at the right level. There are goals and sub-goals, rewards little and small, all aimed at giving you opportunities to engage yourself.
The expansion seems to be an attempt to provide more opportunities to find this sweet spot once you have reached level 60. It's just a fact of human nature that we tend not to be satisfied; apparently we like to have things to acheive even if they are fictional...
All you have to do is make sure the image files don't have personal information in them. You give them meaningless codes rather than patient names. Osirix views DICOM images, which sometimes have all kinds of other potentially indentifying info in the headers you need to clear our (birthday, e.g.). Then there is only one place where the code can be associated with the patient's personal info (and it isn't on the iPod).
I hear your point, but the original poster's analogy was: developing software for both Apple and Microsoft is like developing software for both SCO unix and Linux. In other words, SCO:Linux::Microsoft:Apple. You seem to be pointing out that SCO:Linux::Microsoft:Linux, which is perhaps a better analogy but still not the same thing in light of SCO's actions.
SCO is not just competing with Linux. They have challenged the legal basis for the whole platform in court, and have threatened those who use the software with additional lawsuits. Microsoft/Apple is not a good analogy.
Slashdot Mirror
After reviewing the dictionary definition of the word make
Is it just me or does consulting a dictionary sound like a really poor way of deciding an issue of law?
Steve's greatest humanitarian act was producing Mac OS X.
No particular concept (e.g. 'God') is necessarily incompatible with science.
But certain systems of uncovering truth are. For example, if you decide what to believe is true based on what is written in a particular book, and trust this above any other evidence, you will likely put yourself at odds with science sooner or later.
Dogmatic belief is contrary to science. Religion is not the only place where dogmatic beliefs come from, nor does it necessarily require dogmatic belief, but they often go together.
Fine, you win on this one, science.
But I'd like to see them figure out how the Flying Spaghetti Monster flies.
These results might have caught my eye more if phrased in the reverse:
About a third of the population does not ever use the internet.
Even in the 18-29 age range its about 1 in 5 who are not online.
I think purplewolfhound has a point though. I was kind of surprised you used that quote in the way you did; it's not really appropriate. The quote is about being helped through a time of grief by a friend, which is not specifically a "60s ideal" as far as I can tell.
While I'm responding, I'd also like to say that the sharing of music is not something that first appeared in the 1960's. Music has been shared within communities since its origin. The ownership of music is a much newer concept than the sharing of music.
The dot lets you know you're talking about a website. If you see a commercial and it says "go to getfirefox.com" you know you are supposed to type that into your web browser. If people hear instead "go to getfirefox" that will require further explanation...
The Stroop effect cannot be supposed to have its own neural substrate, it's just an effect of interaction between subtrates that have different functions.
:)
I don't understand what you are saying here. The point is that ACC activity is greater in conflict (color and world incompatible) compared with non-conflict (color and word same color) conditions.
Less activity can be easily explained as paying attention to one instead of two sources of information.
Except that reading the word is generally beleved to be "pre-attentive", that is, whether you pay attention to it or not the word is read. In the Stroop task people are generally trying to pay attention to the ink color, but despite this, the content of the word interferes.
Who the hell allowed this to be published?
The National Academy of Sciences. I guess they should add you as a reviewer?
A voxel, by definition, is the smallest spatial resolution unit.
Right, but your original comment said that fMRI "averages across areas". I still disagree with that, although it seems now to be just an issue of phrasing. Having poor spatial resolution is not the same as intentionally averaging across space. We do motion correction, yes, aligning each volume to one reference, and there is error in that process. Usually there is spatial smoothing as well to increase signal to noise ratio at each voxel. Re-reading your comments it seems that is likely what you are referring to. There is also inter-subject alignment which is sloppy too. There are trade-offs between many factors, spatial and temporal resolution, etc. that must be made for each circumstance. I certainly agree it would be nice to have even better spatial resolution fMRI (although you can get even sub-mm resolution if you restrict your field of view). I just thought your initial comment was misleading and made it seem that fMRI signal processing intentionally disregarded anatomical boundaries, when in fact often the whole goal of the process is to preserve spatial qualities if the signal.
We are also doing a lot of work to characterize the kind of variability you refer to, both anatomically and functionally. However, given the amount of individual variation, when we do find a consistent cross-subject effect it makes it all the more impressive.
The main 'evidence' in this article is from a 'brain scanner' which is probably fMRI. As one of my professor's liked to say, "In fMRI we show people a picture of their ass, then a picture of a hole in the ground, and subract them." Most fMRI statistics include averaging across areas... which is nice, until you remember that our brain isn't on a sphere, but something with fissures in it, and so you just averaged two things that were (cortically speaking) in other worlds (since because of the fissure they might be centimeters apart! Remember the Cortex is a laminar archiecture around the surface)... so I'm highly skeptical, to say the least.
I gotta disagree with this part. First, most fMRI stastics are voxel-based. That is, independent statistics are done on each spatial location at the finest resolution you acquire. Then, you make some corrections for the fact that you are doing so many independent analyses. It's quite rare to "average across areas" and I'm not sure why anyone would do such a thing.
In fact, there are many analysis techniques that treat the cortex as a 2D surface, unfolding it before any other processing. fMRI has many weaknesses, but I don't think this particular criticism is valid. Also, your professors criticism about the subtraction is misleading as fMRI statistics rarely do real subtractions any more, they are really a form of multiple regression (the paper referenced in the article used SPM as their statistics package.)
As for the top-down thing, clearly attention influences perception. In one of the studies mentioned in TFA, the Stroop effect was shown to be diminshed by hypnosis. That's pretty impressive. (In the stroop test, you see a word and must read its color. People are slower when the ink color conflicts with the written word, since reading the word is so fast and automatic.) The subjects in this study were hypnotized to believe the language was just gibberish. I don't know what other kind of evidence of top-down processing you would want!
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
Not sure what you're referring to here - there is an interhemispheric version of the Stroop task, but that's not what's being used here. And evidence for a difference in corpus callosum size between left and right handers is sketchy at best.
Anyways, the Stroop is one of the oldest and best-studied paradigms in experimental psychology, and pretty much everyone shows a robust effect; the processing of the language is so automatic and fast that it interferes with your reading off of the ink color.
Raz has shown a diminished Stroop effect in subjects who were hypnotized to believe the language was just gibberish. That's a pretty impressive effect, because reading is considered quite automatic. Even cooler, the hypnotized showed less anterior cingulate activity than non-hypnotized subjects. The anterior cingulate is active in the Stroop task and others like it, and seems to respond to situations of "conflict" where there are two potential motor resposnses competing for control. It's very nice work.
This is a good point, and I would add that it's important to keep in mind how much language and culture are intertwined. Translating effectively isn't really an exercise in finding the corresponding words in the two languages. Its about finding the most appropriate way to convey the same message in the two languages. I don't really know anything about Iraqi culture, but it is certainly possible that it's not appropriate or effective for a commanding officer to give instructions in a polite, watered down manner.
Beyond that, this is an interesting case, because we are also trusting the translation subtitles on the Discovery channel. The fact of the matter is that translation is a complex, difficult problem that does not necessarily have one best solution.
First, although TFA says that 12 percent of passengers show stress even when they have nothing to hide, it does not say that these 12% fail the test. In fact, it says:
"In our trial, 500 passengers went through the test, and then each was subjected to full traditional searches," said chief executive officer Amir Liberman. "The one person found to be planning something illegal was the one who failed our test."
So that's pretty good. But even if there are a lot of false positives, it serves as an initial screen to tell you where to focus further attention. Keep in mind this is being developed in Israel, where airport security is already quite time-consuming and invasive, because it needs to be. If you can spend more time on the 10% of the passengers who are more likely to be hiding something, that does help.
With this kind of application, a false negative (a miss) is more costly than a false positive. The system should be tuned on the side of caution.
Of course if we were up there "mowing the lawn" there would be at least one vulnerable species there...
Occam's Razor suggests that the original tests were wrong
The simplest solution is not always the correct one. In this case, since the potential benefits are so great, it seems worth looking into the possibility that he beat the disease.
Sort of. TMS is very crude; even with a figure-8 coil that focus the magnetic field you are still stimulating an area of cortex with diameter of a couple centimeters. And you can't really "feed in information" you can just zap the thing (stimulating it or knocking it out depending on how you time the pulses). So TMS is not the answer here...
OK I just read the Science article. What's interesting about it is that they got recordings from a large population of neurons in IT during object recognition and have some cool analyses of the kinds of information that can be extracted from the capture, e.g. how large a population of neurons you need to accurately identify the object, how well the neurons discriminated among the categories and generalized across the same image at different sizes and positions, etc.
Important to remember that these monkeys were trained on a limited stimulus set, so its not that you can tell what the monkey is looking at by loooking at the recordings without knowing it is one of these pre-trained items.
Seems to me they are just recording from IT neurons. There's no input to the cortex. I haven't read the science paper (is it out yet?) but it really seems like they are just analyzing the firing patterns of IT neurons while the monkey looks at objects. Nothing new here technology-wise.
No, they didn't pick that date, the court did. This friday was the "interim deadline" for "Parties to Disclose with Specificity All Allegedly Misused Material Identified to Date and to Update Interrogatory Responses Accordingly". December 22 is set as the final deadline.
Why was level 60 the goal? Was the fun of the game not merit enough?
I think part of what makes games like this interesting is how they capitalize on our goal/reward system. They try to find the spot where you have a tangible goal, which is just difficult to be totally engaging - not too difficult to be frustrating, and not too easy to be boring. This is what humans apparently want to do, we find it immensely rewarding. (See Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow for some good theory and research about this).
I recently started playing w.o.w., but one of the things that impresses me about it is that they way it acheives the appropriate level of challenge is by leaving many levels of challenge open for the player to find the right one. Rather than trying to predict exactly how difficult each task needs to be, the player naturally finds the tasks that are at the right level. There are goals and sub-goals, rewards little and small, all aimed at giving you opportunities to engage yourself.
The expansion seems to be an attempt to provide more opportunities to find this sweet spot once you have reached level 60. It's just a fact of human nature that we tend not to be satisfied; apparently we like to have things to acheive even if they are fictional...
All you have to do is make sure the image files don't have personal information in them. You give them meaningless codes rather than patient names. Osirix views DICOM images, which sometimes have all kinds of other potentially indentifying info in the headers you need to clear our (birthday, e.g.). Then there is only one place where the code can be associated with the patient's personal info (and it isn't on the iPod).
I hear your point, but the original poster's analogy was: developing software for both Apple and Microsoft is like developing software for both SCO unix and Linux. In other words, SCO:Linux::Microsoft:Apple. You seem to be pointing out that SCO:Linux::Microsoft:Linux, which is perhaps a better analogy but still not the same thing in light of SCO's actions.
SCO is not just competing with Linux. They have challenged the legal basis for the whole platform in court, and have threatened those who use the software with additional lawsuits. Microsoft/Apple is not a good analogy.
It seems that Forbes has been drumming this conflict up a bit.
Interesting Groklaw article about some fishy reporting on the issue by Forbes.